Ditching a lucrative career in finance, Vu Dinh Tu opened a coffee shop without telling his parents, joining a wave of young Vietnamese entrepreneurs using espressos to challenge family expectations around work.
Traditionally taken black, sometimes with condensed milk, or even egg, coffee has long been an integral part of Vietnamese culture.
However, starting a cafe is not a career that many of Vietnam’s growing group of ambitious middle-class parents would choose for their children.
Photo: AFP
“At first my family didn’t know much about it,” 32-year-old Tu said. “Gradually they found out — and they weren’t very supportive.”
Tu’s parents repeatedly tried to convince him to stay in his well-paid investment banking job, but he persevered and opened four branches of Refined over four years in Hanoi.
Each is packed from morning till night with coffee lovers enjoying Vietnamese robusta beans — in surroundings more like a cocktail bar than a cafe.
Photo: AFP
His parents “saw the hard work involved in running a business — handling everything from finances to staffing, and they didn’t want me to struggle,” Tu said.
Vietnam was desperately poor until the early 2000s, pulling itself up with a boom in manufacturing, but many parents want to see their children climb the social ladder by moving into steady, lucrative professions such as medicine and law. Coffee, on the other hand, has become a byword for creativity and self-expression.
In Vietnam, “cafes have become a way to break norms around family pressure to do well in school, go to college, get a degree ... work in something that is familiar and financially stable,” said Sarah Grant, an associate professor at California State University.
“They have also become spaces of possibility where you can bring together creative people in a community, whether that’s graphic designers ... musicians, other kinds of do-it-yourself type people,” said Grant, an anthropologist specializing in Vietnam.
Coffee first arrived in Vietnam in the 1850s during French colonial rule, but a shift in the 1990s and early 2000s to large-scale production of robusta — usually found in instant brews — made the country a coffee production powerhouse and the world’s second-largest exporter.
A passion for the coffee business is often linked to that history, Grant said.
Coffee entrepreneurs are “really proud that Vietnam is this coffee-producing country and has a lot of power in the global market,” she added.
Down a tiny alley in the heart of the capital, 29-year-old Nguyen Thi Hue was mixing a lychee matcha cold brew in her new glass-fronted shop — a one-woman “Slow Bar” coffee business.
“When making coffee, it’s almost like being an artist,” said Hue, who had her first cup as a young child thanks to a neighbor who roasted his own.
Coffee is also hugely trendy, and there is money to be made if a cafe appeals to selfie-loving Generation Z.
“No one dresses poorly to go to a cafe,” said Hue, herself decked out in stylish bright-blue-rimmed glasses and matching necktie.
Relaxing at a rival shop nearby, Dang Le Nhu Quynh, a 21-year-old university student, is typical of the new generation of customer — she says the cafe’s style is what counts for her more than the brews.
“I don’t like coffee that much,” she said.
Vietnam’s US$400 million coffee shop industry is growing up to 8 percent a year, branding consultancy Mibrand said.
Thousands of shops are not officially registered with authorities, said Vu Thi Kim Oanh, a lecturer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Vietnam.
“If we have problems with a job at the office, then we quit and we think: ‘Let’s get some money together ... choose one place, rent a house and then open a coffee shop,’” she said. “If it goes well, then you continue. If it doesn’t, you change.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS